Work and Freedom
By Max Lawson
When I was younger, I worked in factories, on production lines. I remember once when we were packing computer games for Christmas. I was positioned on the shrink wrapper ―basically it is an oven with a conveyor belt- the games pass through it in a baggy plastic bag, which then shrinks in the heat. We had to move fast, and it was hot work. If anything went wrong things could pile up fast, and the games, which were expensive, could easily be damaged. I was a temporary worker, and we were guided by the permanent workers who had worked on the line for years.
That was a boring, repetitive job, but it was bearable. So many jobs are far worse than that. Take this story from research we did a few years ago into supermarket supply chains: ‘Ava is a shrimp-peeler at a large plant in Thailand. All day, almost every day, from 6 a.m. to 7 or 8 p.m., she’s driven to peel as fast as she can, pulling off the translucent coats off shrimp after shrimp, enduring the harsh scolding of the lead worker for any mistakes made, and - hardest of all - carrying a weight in her heart for her daughter, who is now living many miles away in Myanmar, Ava’s home country. Though there are no restrictions on bathroom breaks, workers in her position rarely go, says Ava, because they don’t want to sacrifice precious income-earning time.’
Most distinguish between slavery and poorly paid work. Slavery is put in a moral box on its own. It’s a terrible thing, where people are owned like property, forced to work against their will, and are not paid. As soon as you are paid for your work, however poorly paid or exploitative this work is, it is a different moral place to slavery.
For Marx though, slavery of the kind found on the sugar plantations in the Caribbean was all part of the capitalist system of extraction. Slavery is not a separate thing, it is instead is at the very extreme end of a system that divides the world into workers and owners.
Reading about the terrible jobs that millions of workers in the world have to do to survive each day, it’s no wonder the term ‘slave labour’ is often used to describe extremely poorly paid, exploitative, or abusive work conditions ―even if it's not literal slavery.
Yet in other ways, the world today is so different to the England of the mid-19th century when Marx was writing, a world divided into the horribly exploited working class and the capitalist ownership class. Most countries, especially rich ones, now have a substantial middle class, who also earn their living from wages. Many of these work for the private sector, but many do not. Millions work in the public sector. Millions more for not-for profit organisations, NGOs and charities, like me. Surely these jobs show that not all work is exploitation?
Only a handful of pay cheques away from penury
One thing many of these middle-class jobs are, though, is meaningless, something identified by the late David Graeber, as ‘Bullshit Jobs’. He set up an anonymous Gmail and heard from corporate lawyers, accountants and middle-managers from all over the world, who were completely convinced that their jobs were pointless. He concluded that between 30% to 40% of jobs fall into this category. The people doing them described how they felt trapped and had to keep doing them if they were to pay the bills, live in a nice house and have the middle-class life they wanted for their families.
Many middle-class jobs might be pointless, but none of them can be called slavery, and they are infinitely better than horrific jobs like Ava’s. Yet there is still this sense of compulsion that Marx talks about ―for almost everyone in the world, if they stop work, then pretty rapidly their chosen life would come to an end. That virtually everyone is only a few pay cheques away from penury.
(I am more aware of this than usual as I am on unpaid sabbatical at the moment. I am lucky because I love my job, and we were able to save enough so that I could take time off work and still pay my mortgage. Very few people can say that. But we certainly can’t afford for me to be off work any longer.)
The picture is further complicated in that many of those with higher paid jobs also own wealth, too, or have inherited wealth. This can supplement their incomes, enabling them to potentially work less, or have a lower mortgage. In our world of growing wealth inequality this is becoming more and more common.
But there are still only a tiny number of people who can afford not to work at all, and to live off their wealth entirely. Middle-class jobs may be a golden cage with comfy cushions, but they are a cage all the same.
Understanding this matters, I think, because if we are going to change things, we need middle-class workers to see that they have a lot more in common with the majority of working people than with the small group of wealthy owners in our modern world.
Most jobs maintain rather than make
One thing Marx definitely got wrong, and which Graeber points out, is that the separation between workers who produce things, and owners who reap the profits, completely ignores the majority of the work actually done in our economy, which is not about making things but maintaining them. This is care work in the broadest sense. It includes caring for children, for the elderly and for the sick. But he also includes all the work done to maintain our physical environment ―the people who collect our bins, clean our streets. Last weekend we were driving home to London from my mum’s house in Oxford, along a motorway built in 1967. It was built once, has been cared for tens of thousands of times since then, repaired, repainted, re-surfaced.
Much of this care work is of course not paid at all or paid very poorly. The importance of these caring jobs was memorably demonstrated in the pandemic ―that nurses, teachers, rubbish collectors, delivery drivers, supermarket workers are the ones who keep our society going, and who are paid the least and treated the worst. I think the speed with which this revelation was buried was partly because it had such revolutionary implications.
Breaking free from work
How should a society be organised to value and keep the work that matters, minimise the work that doesn’t, and maximise the free time of everyone? How do we fix this, and escape the cage of having to work just to survive?
Mainstream thinking talks mainly about skills. Get yourself more training, better education. This is the classic market solution. You need to give yourself more market power ―make yourself into a commodity that is more in demand, and you will have more choices. This can definitely bring more freedom for some individuals, for a time. If you have highly sought after skills, then you can pick and choose where you work and how much you are paid. But this is not available to most workers. It is fragile and fickle. One day you are an indispensable computer programmer, the next day Artificial Intelligence (AI) is able to do large parts of your job.
Other solutions are collective. Collective action by workers in trade unions strengthens the power of all workers over owners, and in so doing increases the freedom of those workers. My favourite trade union slogan is ‘thank unions for your weekend’.
Welfare states are huge exercises in collective action by societies, and are amazing, wonderful things that confer freedom. Think of the difference in freedom for a worker who has access to quality, universal healthcare for free in the UK, to a worker in the US and so many other countries around the world whose access to healthcare is linked to their job. The more things are provided universally and publicly, the less income is required by individuals, and the less they are compelled to work just to survive.
Equally, ideas like the government guaranteeing you a job, or a universal basic income, are subversive and revolutionary precisely because they will put much more power and freedom into the hands of workers.
It is a clear sign of how topsy turvy our view of the world has become that technology and automation are viewed as a threat, rather than another way to free us from the drudgery of hard, repetitive work. That has not always been the case. In the decades after WW2, technological progress was generally seen as positive, as improving the quality of our lives. Think of the transformative impact of the washing machine ―the hours and hours of work this eliminated for so many.
Not everywhere though. When we moved to Kenya, we told the estate agent who was helping us find a house that we wanted a place to put our washing machine. She looked quizzical and said that in Kenya, they don’t really do washing machines. We were confused, and it took us a while to understand. What she meant is that labour, female labour in this case, is so incredibly cheap compared to the earnings of the rich, that it is still easier to have all your clothes handwashed.
I think whether or not technology benefits us all or simply drives down the cost of labour back to near slavery levels is not about the technology, but about inequality and the ownership of wealth. The problem is not the robots, but ‘who owns the robots’.
With such huge wealth and power in so few hands, trade unions can be crushed when billionaires and corporations lobby for anti-union laws. Tax revenues can plummet when the rich are given huge tax cuts, making welfare states supposedly “unaffordable.” Collective solutions to the problem of work and freedom are then undermined. The only way to fully prevent this is, I think, to have not just more collective action, but much more collective ownership of the wealth that we make and maintain. This would be the path to freedom for all.
ENDS.
Author: Max Lawson, Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam International and EQUALS podcast co-host. He is also the co-chair of the Global People’s Medicines Alliance.
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